When I was a freelancer and I worked from home it wasn't so obvious to me why Americans are so unhealthy. Now it's totally obvious. Cooking and the housekeeping the accompanies it takes time and when every adult member of the household works 40 hours a week, that becomes very difficult. It's even worse because most people don't particularly enjoy their jobs and would like to come home and do something they enjoy. Wouldn't it be great if everyone loved cooking? But it just doesn't work that way.

No, it certainly does not. Used to be we lived in a world of clearly defined gender roles, men worked, women cooked. That state of affairs simply would not do!

I don't have children and I struggle to cook every day. What's the point of all the productivity gains we've made if we all have to work the same amount of hours? When I first started working I once tallied up the percentage of my life that would be spent at work or commuting at the current rate and it was too depressing a calculation to repeat.

One of the first realizations you have to come to if you decide to eat better to lose weight and achieve better health, is that you are going to have to re-orient your daily routine to fit in cooking as an integral part of your lifestyle. There is no two ways around it.

Housekeeping is very difficult when there is no one keeping house, when it's an afterthought in an exhausting day. Me? I'd love to work fewer hours and while I'd have to cut back on some things, I feel my quality of life would be higher. But there aren't many jobs available for 15 or even 30 hours a week and almost none provide any kind of benefits.

One of the most devious schemes ever implemented by our corporatist state was the idea that an employer should become the primary provider of "benefits." These benefits become a form of self-imposed serfdom. Kinda hard to tell your company that they want you to do something for which you object to...because you can't afford to get fired, or to quit, or you'll lose your health coverage. So you suck it up and deal with it. Back to work, you human resource!

Perhaps we should just give up and acknowledge that the price of the American workforce is that few people have time to cook healthy meals. Then we need to focus on having better restaurants. Right now if you are eating out a lot, you are probably getting tons of vegetable oil. Even Thomas Keller, Michelin-Starred Chef, uses canola oil at his enourmously expensive restaurants.

I'm certainly not aiming to bust on Melissa, as I respect her blogging and her obvious intellect greatly, but she misses the forest for the trees here...

This is the price of socially engineering the gender "equality" of the American workforce. The cooking of the stay at home Mom used to be the primary source of nutrition for her entire family. Now she's a tax paying human resource along with her babies' Daddy working to pay off the debt for affording the lifestyle appearances of the mythical middle class, American dream. The fast food restaurants, public school cafeterias and convenience food manufacturers are now feeding the masses.

In short, the functions of the stay at home mother have all been outsourced to the giant corporations.

The idea that career is a form of fulfillment is a fantasy for all but a lucky few.

Oh yes, and that fantasy was the precise dream sold to the masses to get the American female out of the kitchen and out into the workforce. That way they can maintain the lifestyle of buying things we don't need, with money we don't have.

In reality, this idea is just a way to make people feel better about having to give their lives away for trivial things. By the time they retire, their health is so battered that they spend the remaining years shoveling pills into their mouths in a nursing home.

To paraphrase the late George Carlin: It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

It's time to put work back in its place- it's a way to make a living for most of us and a lot of us would be willing to trade off some income for more time. More time to acquire healthy food, cook it, keep house, spend time with our own children, enjoy life...

To think...this was the basic reality for most women in those horrible, oppressive days of the 1950's that have been so reviled and mocked by today's modern-minded progressive.

While we may want to re-think things, you may come to the realization that it's all been thought out for us already.

Well one of the things he told me was that.. he was at the house one night and we started talking and he was laughing and he said,

“Aaron what do you think Women’s Liberation was all about?”

And I had pretty conventional thinking about it at that point and I said,

“I think it’s about women having the right to work to get equal pay with men just like they won the right to vote.”

He started to laugh and he said,

“Your an idiot.”

And I said,

“Why am I an idiot?”

And he said,

“Let me tell you what that was about. We the Rockefellers funded that.”

“We funded Women’s Lib and we’re the ones who got it all over the newspapers and television (through) the Rockefeller Foundation…”

And he says,

“You wanna know why?

There were two primary reasons.

And one reason was we couldn’t tax half the population before Women’s Lib and the second reason was now we get the kids in school at an early age.. we can indoctrinate kids on how to think and with it break up their family. The kids start looking at the state as the family.. As the schools as the officials as their family.. not the parents teaching them. And so those were the two primary reasons for Women’s Lib.”

If you look at America 200-300 years ago, many men were self-employed. Imagine how much stronger families were when mom, dad, and kids were all at home or near home all day, every day. By contrast, now we are trained to laugh at weirdos who dare to home school their kids.

I think I had you pegged all wrong. I saw "Libertarian" and misjudged.

This was a really great post and I agree with it all.

I think a lot of this women's lib BS was more of an afterthought as well. In the 70s and continuing until today, inflation was so bad and wages were so low that the one parent was unable to support the family. Women left the home as a necessity, not because answering phones and filing is really enriching to the spirit. Then, it was painted over as "women taking what's theirs" or whatever other platitudes were popular at the time. But honestly, it was just because one income wasn't enough. Now compound that with an ever increasingly consumer obsessed public and maybe even two incomes won't be enough.

Ask any person if they won the lottery what they would do. Not one of them would work 40 hours a week as some corporate drone. Women don't work because they want to. They work because they have to.

Something I love about truth in general, is that no matter where you start it all leads you down to the inevitable conclusion that Everything is a Scam.

I came around a few years ago because I was heavily interested in economics and finance and started reading about that, which led to Matt Taibbi, which led to Zero Hedge. Which, funny enough, led to Michael Pollan, and Paleo, and then Mangan's and HBD blogs, which led to Roissy and anti fem pro marriage blogs, which led to Countercurrents Publishing and so on. We all start from different places, but the end result is always the same. Some people start with Paleo, and then to Roissy, and then who knows where else, but these quests for truth all seem to be interlinked.

The loss of stay at home moms coincided with the loss of localized food production, and the industrialization of agriculture.

I live in a house where we still grow and process food, albeit fruit and vegetables only, on 3/8 of an acre which is more than it sounds like. 3/8 of an acre is 15,000 square feet. We could expand to 2 acres if doing this was as profitable as, say, dealing blackjack at Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun.

Southern New England has an excellent growing climate, too. Plenty of rain, and it gets very hot and humid in the summer. But the industry is all casinos, "defense" /sarcasm, and public (gov't) services. The US has become like the USSR in that the whole economy has been taken over by government. Factories and workshops were destroyed by globalization. hopefully globalization will fail and we'll rebuild our local production capacities.

But this time we'll do things smarter -- we'll recycle, we'll avoid polluting. We will have to make an economy that isn't based on growth.

I think the bankers realized that the fastest wawy to grow the economy was via gov't.

It's refreshing to read this sort of thing from someone other than a Christian stay-at-home mom (which I am) Excellent post.

Managing to educate, clothe and feed (a mostly primal diet) 5 children on a car mechanic's salary isn't always a bed of roses but I always know deep down that it's a million times better than letting someone else indoctrinate them against me. And I know that it's a FAR better use of my time, skills and intelligence to figure out how to do that than to serve the government by filing papers or flipping burgers or any of the other things my teachers may have dreamed for me once upon a time :)

I enjoy your blog. I found you through Mark Sisson's link to your primal baby post and then re-found you through a mention on Terry's (Breathing Grace) blog.

The simple fact is that not all men are angels. (Not all women are angels either but this isn't central to the point I'm about to make.) When you set society up so that only earning money can get you food and shelter, then set society up further so that only one gender can earn that money, and then someone from the gender that can't earn winds up abused by someone from the gender that CAN earn, that's kind of a problem. Especially when there are children involved.

And please do not insult my intelligence by saying that doesn't happen, or doesn't happen often enough. I had to escape my marriage with my clothes on my back and turn my husband in to the police. I've been there. This is not armchair philosophizing to me.

There are lots and lots of issues with the feminist movement and I do find myself arguing with Official Feminists from time to time on issues about which I think they have lost their flippin' minds. But at the end of the day it's unbelievably dangerous to set things up so that women can't support ourselves, so that we have to sell our lives to men so that we can continue to live, and then yell at us for trying to break out of that situation and make something of ourselves.

It's not like you libertarians or the conservatives have offered us any alternatives but getting married or going home to Daddy. Til you do, feminism will continue to be important to a significant number of women, even if most of them are too embarrassed to give their beliefs that label.

And, you're Hawai'ian. I hope that means you're from the people indigenous to the islands and not simply that you are a resident of the colonially imposed state. If you are one of the former and not just one of the latter, you're not that far away from the time that your people lived very differently than Americans do now. And your women had considerably more authority. Unless you're ready to encourage American women to move in that direction, simply denouncing feminism isn't useful to us at all. Escaping from a burning house without a shelter to run to just leaves you homeless.

If what you're about to say is "well, you can work from home while you raise the kids," yes, that's true, and some women do that. And for some reason feminism largely ignores it. (I leave that question wide open, and your opinions about it may very well be valid.) But I don't see much difference between earning at home and earning outside the home since you're going to be massively distracted by your job when you need to do housework and by your kids when you need to do your job and if you're homeschooling that just makes it all worse. (Something that, again, I am living to some extent!) It'd help if men would become more home-focused again, but most of you don't seem much enthused by that idea. So... what to do?